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Library geek-I-am Wiki
'Welcome to the Library geek-I-am Wiki!' This wiki is intended as a tool for public library staff looking to market their libraries in the new digital age. Libraries and Social Media Social media plays a key role in public libraries in this digital age. Whether it is keeping current patrons up to date on programs and events happening in the library or reaching out to non-users in hopes of getting them to visit the library, social media can help. The four social media tools I will be discussing below are among the most popular and will help library staff to reach a widespread audience and market their libraries in a way that was not possible in the past. Facebook Overview Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004. However, at that time it was only open to college students. In 2005, Facebook expanded to include high school students. By 2006 the owners and operators of Facebook could see their potential and became accessible to everyone. Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.https://www.facebook.com/facebook/info. Benefits of Facebook in Public Libraries As of March 2013 Facebook has over 1 billion users who log on monthly.http://www.statisticbrain.com/facebook-statistics/ Facebook has taken social media interaction to a new level of communication. It provides an outlet to market your library for FREE, interact with your patrons and share valuable information. If you don't have a library page set up in Facebook yet, take into consideration all the benefits you can receive from having a library page: *You can share information for free. This is a good way to market the library at NO COST! *Library patrons can "like" your page, allowing them to follow the library and receive any updates that you post. *Every time someone "likes" your page, all their friends see that they "like" your library. This leads to easy promotion that attracts other followers to your library page. *Anything you post on your library page is then sent into the "feeds" of your followers so they can always catch an update. How to make a Facebook account The first part is easy, simply go here and click the "Create Page" button. Voila! You have a new Facebook page. Actually, it's not quite that easy. There is some information you have to add first. You have to provide the name of your organization and pick an organization "type." Facebook doesn't provide many choices here. Your best bets are "government" or "nonprofit" which are both located in the "company, organization, or institution" pull-down menu. Make sure to check the box marked "I'm the official representative of this person, business, band, or product and have permission to create this Page." After you have gathered 25 fans, you can create a unique username and shortened URL for your library's Facebook page. Most likely, you'll want to shorten your library's name if it is long. After you have filled out all the introductory information, like your address, phone number, hours, etc., then stop. Before you do much more with your fledgling Facebook page, you need to figure out a couple of things: *Who will do the work of the Page, like posting updates? *Who will answer questions? *Will you use the Events section of the account? If so, who will post events? *How often wil you post updates? Who keeps track of user names and passwords? Figure out those practical details, and also create some one-year goals for your Facebook presence. Goals can include how many status updates you plan to post per day/week or how many fans you want. You can also discuss more difficult issues, like what types of content you will post and which specific audience will be your focus. Once your library's Facebook page is created, you can start thinking about how you might customize the library's Facebook presence for your customers. First, gather your Facebook team. It’s a good idea to have more than one person manage your Facebook Page. Why? The goal with a Facebook Page is to start and continue conversations about your staff and your stuff—and conversations require responses. Monitoring conversations and creating responses when needed is best handled by more than one person, so you can adequately cover the day’s interactions. On another level, it allows you to spread out the work . . . and the fun. Once your Facebook team is established, they can look at those one-year goals and figure out the best way to meet them. Maybe you decided you want pictures and videos of library events on the Page. Great! There’s an easy way to connect your library’s Flickr and YouTube accounts to your Facebook Page via status updates. That way, when you post a new video in YouTube, a link also appears on your Facebook wall and gets sent to all your Facebook followers. This can be done with pretty much any type of content that has an RSS feed: your library’s blog, Twitter account, etc. The hard part isn’t setting up automatic posting updates; it’s figuring out what to share and what not to share. For example, ask yourself questions such as: “Do I want to send all my library’s tweets to Facebook, or just some of them?” Both are easy to do—it really depends on who your Facebook users are. What to do with a Library Facebook page *Your Facebook library page will allow you to share information like hours, programs, special events, online resources and updates. You can also post photos, videos, and applications (like searching the library catalogue). *Patrons can communicate with each other through the library page, share thoughts about a book, or a master gardening class. *Customer Service - you can answer patron questions and promote library events, get feedback on classes or promote local authors and community events. *Get feedback: ask patrons what they are reading or what authors they like (the more discussion and interaction the better the results). *Add a Social Media button to your website and blog. Click here to learn more. *Link your blog or Twitter account to your Facebook page (this is an easy way to share information in multiple locations). *Place a link to your Facebook page on your other social media sites. *Add a "welcome" or landing page for new users. When to update Facebook The status update box is your main point of connection to your local Facebook crowd. Keeping your library’s status updated is real work, and it takes time to do right. Daily engagement—keeping up a steady flow of content and conversation—is key. To keep up that steady flow of content, you have to devote staff to adding content to your Facebook page. How many posts you share in a day/week/month is really up to you, but at least a minimum of 10 posts per month and no more than 30. It is important to find the right balance. You don’t want your patrons to be left in the dark about events but you also do not want to spam their news feeds with your posts either. Give your Facebook community the content they want, and they will become your fans. Even more importantly, they’ll start interacting. My guess? Get that interaction going, and your customers—the ones wanting to interact with you in Facebook pages—will become advocates for you and your library—not only online, but in person, too. Category:Browse Twitter Overview Twitter was founded in March 2006, and became incorporated on April 19, 2007. Twitter's mission is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.https://about.twitter.com/company Benefits of Twitter in Public Libraries Twitter has over 554 million registered users.http://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/ If your current or potential patron base fits with the Twitter user profile, and you can commit to regularly tweeting about things your patrons will find interesting, then you may decide to sign up to Twitter. Twitter has a range of uses and benefits for library’s, and can complement other communication channels. *Twitter is a way to keep your followers up to date with current information about your library. Importantly, it lets followers communicate with you too. For example, libraries can use Twitter to converse with patrons, recommend newly acquired books and retweet interesting tweets from famous and local authors. *Tweeting about upcoming events or new books can encourage your followers to find out more, potentially leading to more visits to your library. *Twitter is a chance to liven up your image. Tweeting about your staff and your library's personality gives followers a sense of your library as more than just a supplier of books. For example, libraries can use quirky language and humour to share links to interesting articles, promote events, comment on literary awards and announce new materials via Twitter. How to make a Twitter account The video below will instruct you on how to make a twitter account. What to do with a library Twitter account There is a strong overlap in the kinds of people who use libraries (or would do if they knew what you offered) and the kinds of people who tweet. And unlike some other social media, Twitter users are receptive to interacting with libraries on this platform. *'Analyse your tweets' There are a million and one packages that promise you some statistical insight into your Twitter account—the trick is finding the ones whose information you can act ''on. Stick your Library’s Twitter handle into TweetStats and check out how many of your tweets are replies and retweets (RTs)—if the combined total is below 25 percent, you need to make an active effort to change this; once you do, your network will grow. Tweetstats will also tell you when you tweet, which allows you to know (rather than guess) whether your followers are getting a consistent level of service across the week. If all your tweets happen at 9 a.m. (when ‘the person who tweets’ gets into work and thinks, hmm, better do my tweeting for the day) then you need to change that. Combine information about when you tweet with the information that Tweriod gives you about when your followers are online, and you can start to really use Twitter in a focused, targeted, and successful way. *'Tweet multimedia''' Twitter embeds most multimedia in your tweet, meaning that it can be viewed/watched on Twitter itself without your followers having to leave the site. This is a huge plus, along with the fact that it’s much more interesting to tweet pictures, videos, slideshows, and so on than just plain text all the time. Links to YouTube and Slideshare, plus pictures via Twitpic, will magically make the objects appear in your tweet. *'Tweet more pictures' If you’re tweeting about something happening in your library, take a pic on your phone and tweet that too. It’ll get much more traction that way. Pictures of displays, of workshops and classes, of new décor, of posters you’ve just put up—even print screens of websites you’re linking to so users know what they’re getting themselves into; this massively increases the amount of clicks on those links. If you really want to get some serious traction, make an infographic and tweet that. Infographics get a whopping 832 percent more RTs than articles or regular images. *'If something is important, tweet it four times' Simply tweeting a link to something once does not constitute marketing. As Tweriod will tell you, only a small percentage of your followers are online at any one time, so you need to tweet important information and links across a period of two days and covering different times of day (and schedule a midnight tweet too if you have international followers in different time zones). If it’s a link to a blog post, rather than just tweeting the title each time, tweet a key piece of information or quote from the post to hook more people in over time. *'Use hashtags (but don’t go mad)' Hashtags allow users to find related tweets on a topic—which means they don’t need to already know who you are and what your Twitter username is to find your tweets. So it’s good to get involved with hot topics using hashtags, but never, ever use more than two in the same tweet, as that seems somewhat desperate. *'Ask questions' Don’t just tell your followers stuff, ask your followers stuff. Then RT the best answers, maybe use Storify to collate them and blog about them. People love to feel part of a community. *'Get retweeted and your network will grow ' Nothing gets you new followers like tweeting something great and having loads of people retweet it—it exposes your tweet and your Twitter presence to several new networks at once, some of whom will be inspired to check you out and follow you. The best way to get RTs is to tweet really useful punchy things of course—nothing beats great content—but there are things you can do to make it more likely. Firstly, simply asking people to RT. If you say ‘Please RT’ you will get 10 times the number of RTs you would otherwise. If you spell it out—‘Please retweet’—you will get 23 times as many! But you can only use this very sparingly, when something is really important or useful. If you abuse people’s kindness they’ll soon switch off and stop RT’ing. Another thing to keep in mind is, if possible, leave a RT space. By which I mean, if you can express yourself in, say, 100 characters rather than the full 140, that allows someone wanting to manually retweet you some space to add their own comment or endorsement. *'Put your Twitter handle EVERYWHERE' People need to know you’re on the platform at all, so tell them—put your username on slide decks and leaflets and handouts, put it on business cards, embed your tweet-stream on your library homepage, have a live tweet-stream on your digital display screens for a day. You’re putting the effort in to be there, so shout loudly about your activity! *'Finally, avoid these pitfalls' : Don’t ever tweet ‘direct message us for more info’. Only people you follow can DM you, so you’re asking people to get in touch via a medium most of them can’t use. : Some picture services, like YFrog or Instagram, don’t display your pictures in Twitter—people have to follow a link and leave the site to view your image. This doesn’t sound like a big deal but it’s actually very annoying for your followers. Unless you have a really good strategic reason to use one of these sites, stick to something like TwitPic (which is the default on Twitter anyhow), which ensures the pictures will appear in the tweets themselves. : Only let third party apps have access to your account if you really need them. From the Twitter Home Page, go to settings, then apps''—''chances are you won’t believe just how many applications have access to your account. Twitter accounts don’t get hacked because someone guesses the password, they get hacked when a third party app’s security is lax—so revoke access to everything you don’t actively need. : Speaking of third party apps, don’t ever sign up to an app, stats package, client, or anything which tweets on your behalf. Many apps will ask for permission to do this but won’t actually ever use it—but some will auto-tweet as a way of promoting themselves. Personally I think it looks bad enough when individuals let apps tweet things like ‘My week on Twitter: 5 follows, 2 unfollows, 18 mentions’ —but for an organization to let this happen is completely unacceptable. When to update Twitter *Twitter is an interactive, conversational medium—but sometimes it’s hard for organizations not to use it as a broadcast medium. In an ideal world, a rule of thumb to aspire to is one in four tweets are broadcasts, the other three being replies, RTs, or links to third-party content which is potentially useful to your followers but not necessarily directly related to your library. YouTube Overview YouTube was founded in February 2005, and allows billions of people to discover, watch and share originally-created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.http://www.youtube.com/yt/about/ Benefits of a library YouTube channel YouTube is an extremely popular social media site, and is just one more way to reach an audience. By uploading videos related to your library you are inviting patrons and potential patrons to visit your library in a whole other manner. YouTube allows you to market your library and show the world what makes it so special. How to make a library YouTube channel You can learn how to create a YouTube channel by watching the video below. What to do with a library YouTube Channel There is so much potential in a library YouTube channel, here a just a few ideas: *promotional and instructional content *patron testimonials *interviews with library and civic leaders *musical performances or other events happening in your library *screencasts demonstrating library databases and self-check machines When to update a library YouTube Channel How often you add new videos is really up to you. But a new video once or twice a month couldn't hurt. Conclusion These social media tools may seem similar in concept but, in order to successfully market your library and to communicate not only with current library users but also to reach potential users, social media tools can quickly become your best friend. When looking to expand your target audience you must go where the people are, and they are all on these social media outlets. Morningstar1231 (talk) 23:42, December 6, 2013 (UTC)Morningstar1231 You can also visit my blog Library Geek-I-Am here. Category:Browse